John Alexander: A Retrospective covers a span of thirty years of the artist´s career, and includes approximately one hundred works from the late-1970s to the present. The exhibition will be on view from April 13 to June 22, 2008, at Museum Of Fine Arts, Houston.
John Alexander was born in 1945 in Beaumont, Texas, an oil and fishing-industry town in the marshlands of the Gulf Coast, a region heavily influenced by Cajun, Creole, and African-American cultures. Early in his career, Alexander produced visionary landscapes and feverish, spidery, and often self-revealing drawings that incorporate the imagery of his East Texas heritage. His work first took the national stage at the 1977 Corcoran Biennial, and in 1980 he was the focus of a major solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art.
In 1979, Alexander left his native Texas and moved to New York, after which he gravitated more obsessively than ever to depicting the bayou landscapes of his youth. Beginning in the mid-1980s, and inspired by his garden in Amagansett, Long Island, and his various travels, Alexander began to animate his sketches with images of flora and fauna.
His art heightens our consciousness of the natural environment, and if he has one predominant subject, it is the depredation of this environment. Ultimately, his work stands as a passionate elegy to the earth as he has known it, or as he once described one of his works: "It´s a look at Shangri La before the wrecking ball hits."
The picture shows John Alexander, Glory Bound, 1993, Private Collection, John Alexander. -- www.mfah.org
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